Unreal Tournament III

Unreal Tournament III gave the 9800 GTX + its first clear victory (14% on average) over the Radeon HD 4850. And uncharacteristically, that lead tended to increase with antialiasing enabled. And although the Radeon HD 3870 X2 stayed well ahead of the 4850 without filtering, the hierarchy changed spectacularly once the filters were enabled!

Bottom line as i see it, this is a Smashing card!Prices on the UK market put a HD4850 at £120 (ebuyer.com) where as the GTX260 is £300! considering the overal performance difference between the two, i'd get 2 HD4850's in Crossfire mode and still be cheaper than a GTX260.

Once again AMD/ATI have produced a card that isnt amazing on performance, but bang for your buck its probably the best card on the market at those prices

The very fact that, yet again, we have a whole page dedicated to noise is a sure sign that these manufacturers still don't have all of the priorities covered. How many years ago was it that THG posted that funny video showing an Nvidia card as a leaf blower & barbecue? - and still we have to put up with substandard cooling solutions. I haven't bought a graphics card for years now without getting an aftermarket heatsink to go with it - thank god for companies like Zalman & Thermalright who are sparing our ears!!

Thanks to Tom’s Hardware for including the FSX test in these results. It’s interesting to see how differently the cards line up with FSX. No other game produces similar results or shows up the new technology in a different light. To any serious simmer it is the AA/AF performance on big screens that is crucial and this shows the biggest differences and biggest insights. Also it was good to see that my card (an overclocked 8800 GTX) is still top of the pile!

lets just hope that this brings in enough profits to help the CPU market, because if you look at the info on the intel nahalem, it looks as though they have alot more potential, but they dont want to release that potential just yet, where as, if AMD release a competitor then we might just see the nahalems full potential!!